Photovoltaics involves converting sunlight directly into electricity using suitable semiconductor materials. Our group focuses on a variety of such semiconducting materials to capture sunlight and fabricate devices to convert the captured sunlight into electricity. Current projects in this area include:

2. 2D Photovoltaics: Exploiting the exotic properties of novel two-dimensional materials such as MoS2, MoSe2, graphene etc. to fabricate solar cells that are about a nanometer thick in size. Such solar cells exhibit high energy densities and enable the possibility of fabricating paper-like solar cells.

4. 3D-PV architectures: Exploration of three dimensional solar architectures of different shapes and sizes using commerically available flat solar cell panels. Such optimized 3D structures show better stability and reliability when it comes to power management.

Cement Chemistry

Cement manufacturing contributes significantly to CO2 emissions around the world. Although an ancient material, the atomic structure and reactivity of cement is porrly understood. Our group focuses on understanding the atomic and electronic structure of cement materials, and in turn tune the reactivity of cement towards water. The idea is to design phases of cement that have the ability to react and be processable at faster rates, and at the same time be able to limit CO2 emissions during these processing conditions.

Thermal Transport

Understanding thermal transport at the nano and mesoscale is crucial to designing efficient thermoelectric devices. Our group focuses on designing novel thermoelectric architectures and understanding their thermal ane electronic behavior at various scales using a combination of atomistic and continuum scale calculations. Currently, we are designing functionalized forms of graphene and nanoporous silicon that exhibit low thermal conductivity, and at the same time show high electronic conductivity - a useful characteristic for applications in thermoelectric devices.

Water Desalination

Water is a growing issue in modern world. Usage of salt water to meet the increasing demands for potable water is crucial. Further, finding ways to desalinate water more efficiently and at lower costs compared to current technologies is important. To this end, our group focuses on using novel nanoscale membrane materials to desalinate water efficiently. These membrane materials include nanoporous graphene and silicon.

Two-Dimensional Materials

Two-dimensional materials such as transition metal dichalcogenides, graphene, graphene oxide and hybridized monolayers are being extensively considered for next-generation, large area thin film technologies. Our group studies a number of these materials including MoS2, MoSe2, WS2, graphene oxide, graphene etc. for applications in optoelectronic devices, energy conversion and energy storage assemblies. We perform a number of atomistic calculations to understand, predict and design these materials, that go hand-in-hand with experimental synthesis and characterization.